WEEKEND WARRIOR

By JOE GLICKMAN

Published: February 13, 1998

Clipped to a broken birch tree halfway up a 350-foot wall of ice in the High Peaks region of the Adirondacks, I nervously asked my guide to repeat the safety procedure he'd just explained. Then I asked him again. The third time, he stated curtly: ''Wait here. I'll tell you what to do again when I get to the top.'' He sank his pick into the ice, looked back over his shoulder and said, ''Don't worry, you couldn't kill yourself if you tried!'' He flashed a smile and disappeared around a pillar of ice dripping like a dozen leaky faucets, leaving me to ponder my gorgeous, precarious perch.

Outside of subscribers to The American Alpine Journal, most people assume scaling vertical walls of ice is strange, scary and cold, an activity pursued by reckless thrill-seekers. True, ice is cold, and the menacing ice axes and sharp crampons -- 12-point steel spikes attached to boots -- make a climber look like a cross between a medieval knight and a telephone repairman.

But lighter, warmer, water-resistant clothing and improved (and cool-looking) hardware have made this young sport safer, more comfortable and chic. As a result, climbing fragile-looking curtains of ice has never been more popular. In 1997, the Eastern Mountain Sports Climbing School in North Conway, N.H., taught 750 students, up from 600 in 1996. And Ed Palen, who runs the Adirondack Rock and River Guide Service in Keene, N.Y. (20 minutes from Lake Placid), says he has noticed a considerable jump in his ice-climbing clientele.

Mr. Palen, a lean, bearded 41-year-old who has climbed rock and ice in Alaska, China, Mexico and Nepal, says the popularity of indoor climbing gyms, telecasts of ice climbing on ESPN's Winter X Games, and Jon Krakauer's best-selling ''Into Thin Air'' have brought this esoteric outgrowth of mountaineering to the general public's attention. ''Hardly a national craze,'' he says, ''but no longer is the sport confined to the so-called lunatic fringe.''

I found Mr. Palen by calling the Mountaineer, an outdoor store in Keene Valley, N.Y., and the unofficial hub of ice climbing in the Adirondacks. I told him that I was a novice rock climber with no ice-climbing experience. ''Fine,'' he said. ''You sound like most of our first-time clients.'' I asked about the danger factor. ''Done properly,'' he said, ''ice climbing is much safer than people imagine. Climbing becomes dangerous when the route is too hard or if someone doesn't know what they're doing.''

Later, sitting before Mr. Palen's wood stove in his renovated 1830's farmhouse, where we watched the Knicks sweat it out against the Heat in Miami, he told me: ''If I don't feel comfortable with the conditions or the way I feel, I back off. The deadliest thing in the mountains is the male ego.''

Despite his reassurances, I slept poorly the night before my guided two-day course. Some of my fear is inherited. My father is a dedicated indoorsman, and my mother once stepped on a patch of ice on a slight incline on our driveway and froze, crying out, ''I'm immobilized!'' But some of my fear is acquired. Last summer, as part of a five-day climb on Mount Rainier in Washington, I was handed two ice axes, or ''tools,'' lowered deep into a crevasse (a large fissure) in the Nisqually Glacier, and told to climb out.

This yawning chasm -- an eerie, hauntingly beautiful place -- vanished under a bulge hundreds of feet below my crampons. After several deep, audible breaths, I quieted my mind and started up as fast as possible. By hammering the thin, serrated picks of my ice axes into the blue-green ice and kicking and balancing on the two spikes protruding from the toe of each foot, I hacked my way to the surface. In theory I was using a technique called front-pointing, but my execution was more like a glacial mugging.

In January I decided to learn how to climb correctly and, I hoped, with a bit more panache. I recruited a companion: Al Levine, a 45-year-old mostly retired alarm installer I met in 1993 during a 30-day kayak race from Chicago to New York. Six hours out of Brooklyn, we turned off Route 73 onto a narrow road lined with thigh-deep snowbanks. The thermometer outside the rustic lodge at the end of the road read 15 degrees.

The next morning we met our guide, Ian Osteyee, a genial 30-year-old ex-Marine who has been climbing rock and ice for half his life. He fitted us with lined, plastic mountaineering boots, crampons, a harness made of webbing that fits around the waist and thighs, two ice axes, a hard helmet and, most important, lunch. Mr. Osteyee, a sturdy hockey-playing history major in college, carried other essential climbing hardware like rope and tubular ice screws.

Hiking across Chapel Pond on our first day out, Mr. Osteyee pointed to a 300-foot route called ''Chouinard's Gully,'' named after Yvon Chouinard, a blacksmith who developed an ice ax in the 1960's that revolutionized the sport. Our destination was a climb called ''Lions on the Beach,'' inspired by Hemingway's novel ''The Old Man and the Sea.'' We passed other routes whose names reflected the twisted humor that serious ice climbers often possess, including ''Whales in the Jungle'' and ''Jackrabbit.''